With increasing surprise, I follow the Ukrainian discussion about public finances. Strangely, some prominent Ukrainians seem to think that taxes and public expenditures have no relationship to one another, arguing that public expenditures should be increased and taxes should be cut. But that is called populism, the disease Ukraine has suffered...

Editor’s note: US Ambassador Geoffrey R. Pyatt gave remarks at the “Conference on Legal and Governance Reform,” sponsored by the US-Ukraine Business Council and Kyiv School of Economics on October 30, 2015 in Kyiv. Pyatt’s remarks have been shortened below. The full version is available here.What a difference a year...

Vladimir Putin must hate aviation. The tragic crash of a Russian airliner in Egypt last weekend, with mounting evidence of a terrorist attack by ISIL, is but the latest in a series of air disasters challenging the Kremlin over the last year. All of these have directly resulted from Moscow’s ever more aggressive foreign policy — inUkraine,...

The Internet has been doing too good of a job promoting freedom, international cooperation, and the exchange of ideas. So much so that governments around the world are fighting back.That appears to be the bottom line of a recent survey by Freedom House. Its Freedom on the Net 2015, the fifth in its annual series on government policies and...

Ahmed Chalabi, age 71, has died of a heart attack in Baghdad. As a close observer of his unique role in provoking the Iraq War – a foreign policy and strategic military disaster 12 years ago – I can’t help but look back on that time as an age of innocence. That may sound ironic, but I think it’s true given that many Americans now see...